New York Times Covers for Radical, Violent Leftist Carter Camp

13 Jan 2014

A radical-leftist American Indian who was convicted of abducting, confining, and beating four postal workers during a militant crime spree has died. The New York Timesbegan its report of his death by first listing all of the wrongs American Indians suffered at the hands of the U.S. government 100 years prior to the thug’s crimes, as though they somehow provided context or excused the man’s illegal and violent behavior.

Carter Camp, a radical and violent leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM), an American Indian version of the former Black Panther Party, took up arms in 1973 against the U.S. government to seize Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The New York Times framed the heinous crimes of Carter and his group as “retaliation” for the atrocites which had occurred three generations prior to Native Americans.

Camp was ultimately sentenced to time in federal prison for his actions during the Wounded Knee Standoff, in which the group took eleven hostages at gunpoint and a U.S. Marshal was left paralyzed and ultimately died. The New York Times only acknowledged these heinous facts after first attempting to encourage readers to be sympathetic to the perpetrator.

The NYT article is not the only recent example of the paper choosing to blame either the U.S. government or law enforcement for the illegal and violent actions of far-left activists within the U.S.

A similar issue occurred in October 2011 pertaining to the issue hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters being arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. New York Times writer Colin Moynihan originally blamed the New York Police Department for the arrests, writing, “After allowing them onto the bridge, the police cut off dozens of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.” Editors at The New York Times changed the story within twenty minutes and changed any language that blamed law enforcement for the crimes of the demonstrators. Interestingly, the Occupy story, like the article on Camp’s death, both opened their first sentences with justifications for the crimes of leftists prior to reporting what those crimes were.

The NYT‘s issues surrounding its efforts to shill for the Occupy Wall Street movement did not stop there; it assigned a writer named Natasha Lennard to cover the protest movement. She was arrested at the Brooklyn Bridge and immediately condemned New York police for “arresting a journalist” in interviews. Lee Stranahan released video revealing Ms. Lennard at an Occupy planning meeting discussing the importance of staging arrests so that movements would get publicity. The New York Timesbroke ties with the writer after Stranahan released the findings of his investigative efforts.

The same New York Times writer from the bridge article, Colin Moynihan, also wrote a series of articles on a radical far-left activist named Scott Crow. In Moynihan’s May 28, 2011 article titled “For Anarchist, Details of Life As F.B.I. Target,” the New York Times selectively published reports from the approximately five years the FBI monitored Crow. Moynihan and the New York Times never mentioned in their article pertinent facts that are readily available to anyone using Google – including that he described himself during those five years as being part of a U.S.-based armed paramilitary movement that was in solidarity with the Zapatista rebels from Chiapas, Mexico.

By reporting on the FBI’s surveillance of Crow without informing readers of the clear justifications the FBI had to monitor him, the New York Times spun the story to further an anti-FBI, anti-law enforcement, pro-leftist narrative.

The NYT’s Moynihan also wrote an article about this writer after I worked undercover with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (FBI JTTF) at the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC).

The FBI and other law enforcement agencies had worked diligently to stop a group of anarchists and other leftists who openly stated they were going to shut down the RNC by any means necessary. The radical, far-left efforts led to several bomb plots. While undercover, this writer had the honor of discovering one of them and helping stop it. Two men had made Molotov cocktails to pass out to Black Bloc protesters. They intended to throw them at Republican delegates and law enforcement officers, but after getting caught they claimed their targets were police vehicles.

The New York Times article relied heavily on Scott Crow, for whom Moynihan and the paper later presented half-truths. Instead of expressing outrage that the left-of-center “Peace and Justice Community” had spawned several bomb plots, Moynihan and the New York Times editors framed the issue as activists feeling betrayed by their government spying on them. The New York Times and Moynihan had effectively framed the story in a way whereby the bomb makers were victims, and law enforcement were somehow the perpetrators.

The far-leftists lost that battle, and both far-left bomb makers ultimately admitted their fault and their guilt. One of them had initially argued that he was entrapped by the FBI and this writer. After he admitted he had made the entire story up, the New York Times did not give front section coverage to the admissions, putting the admission in the Midwest section, buried in the middle of the paper.

The New York Times later went on to accuse me of encouraging the bomb plot. I had to sue them for a correction. Unlike the issue of the Occupy arrests at the Brooklyn Bridge, the paper did not change the text in their online article, nor did they correct it immediately. It took them over one month to issue the correction and they only did so after I filed a lawsuit against them. The lawsuit is still in the courts years later, and the New York Times’ attorneys have argued that they have the right to print an opinion as fact, even if it causes damage and is factually incorrect.

All of these issues have commonality in that the New York Times makes victims out of far-left radicals, demonizes the victims of the radicals as somehow bearing responsibility, and does so in its articles prior to reporting the facts of the case to its readers.